was itself in danger of being voted off the island, its selections written off as too well-known to be interesting. You can hardly blame them for wanting to change things up for the big 10-year anniversary. So this year, we have the new Canada Reads: we, the public, vote in our picks for the top 40 essential Canadian novels of the past decade, and the hand-picked celebrity jury choose their picks from that list.

And it’s still going to suck. In a year when the Giller Prize is exciting again, Canada Reads has boldly found ways to become even more boring. Even when they copy their critics – because the new Canada Reads looks suspiciously like last year’s

– the CBC can’t catch a break with both hands and a ninety-foot gill net.

A public vote-in works when you call for the overlooked and the underappreciated. But when the call is for the top 40 “essential” Canadian novels of the past ten years, it’s hard to imagine that the list will contain any more surprises than that other top 40 list, the one by Casey Kasem. The early results are not encouraging:

Life of Pi, The Blind Assassin, Three Day Road, The Year of the Flood

… none of these is a dark horse.

Does it matter? None of these are necessarily bad books. They may just be “essential Canadian novels.” But that’s not the point. The point is that arts coverage should tell us things we don’t know. It doesn’t matter if Canada Reads chooses to be highbrow or middlebrow or no-brow, or if it chooses to focus on genre fiction, or if it restricts itself, improbably, to Canadian poetry; it should be opening the doors to half-forgotten rooms and encouraging us to explore, instead of letting us plop down on our same old familiar couch again. Margaret Atwood is, dare I say, not precisely undiscovered.

But who am I kidding? Canada Reads isn’t about “arts coverage,” it’s about audience size. It proceeds with the same mindset that produces online polls declaring J.K. Rowling to be the greatest writer England has ever produced. In the age of social media, the easiest way to engage a large audience is to pander to our competitive instincts. Have us vote for our favourite books, and then listen and cheer as our chosen gladiators bludgeon each other with thick, ponderous hardcovers. It’s not necessary to actually read the damn things; you’ve already done that. All you have to do is cheer.

And so we will all stand around, going through the same old motions, favouring the safe and familiar over the risks and pleasures of anything new. This is what Canada Reads offers. The natives of the South Pacific island of Papitiki, a people known for their love of the arts and their fine abalone carvings, have a word for this kind of thing. They call it a circle jerk.

• A.J. Somerset is the author of the novel

Combat Camera

. He has done extensive research on South Sea civilizations that do not, in fact, exist.

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